The Home Sysadmin

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Recently, I returned from a business trip, groggy and exhausted after a series of delayed flights. I expected to be greeted enthusiastically by my daughters but, instead, both immediately started complaining about problems with their computers. My older daughter, Elizabeth, was having issues with pop-ups. Emily, the younger one, told me about games that were crashing to the desktop.

I sighed, put away my luggage, and went to work.

The issues they encountered were fairly minor. A quick scan with Pest Patrol cleared out Elizabeth’s system and a squirt of compressed air cleaned out the dust from Emily’s system fans that was causing some heat buildup.

We’ve often written about building home networks, even down to wiring your house and building your own LAN party room. What we really haven’t talked about, though, is what to do after you get all that stuff running.

Most people-myself included-have developed their digital homes ad-hoc. Add a system here, move an old system to the kids room there. Before you know it, you’re spending half your time troubleshooting problems and making stuff work. If you’re like me, you probably have a backlog of things you’d like to do, but either can’t immediately afford the cost or simply don’t have time.

For example, when we wired our house, we neglected to add an Ethernet drop in the family room. I’d love to have a gigabit connection in there, to facilitate media sharing around the house. For now, I’ve “settled” on wireless, which isn’t quite as robust for big media files. Adding the additional wiring isn’t an option, due both to cost and the hassle of having to tear open the walls.

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